Jolt Awards: Coding Tools

Jolt Awards: Coding Tools

The Jolt Awards in the category of Coding address the past 12 months' innovation in tools that help developers do the actual work of creating code. This category comprises editors, IDEs, code analysis tools, SCM products, debuggers, and the like. In essence, it's a mature category of hands-on tools that everybody uses at some point.

As in previous years, the judges  Robert Del Rossi, David Dossot, Gary K. Evans, Jonathan Hartley, Larry O'Brien, Gary Pollice, Mike Riley, Rick Wayne, and I  pored over the nominees, selected finalists, and put the top products through their paces to establish the #1 coding tool, to which we accorded the 2012 Jolt Award. The two runners-up (in a very close competition this time) receive Jolt Productivity Awards. And in this particular category, the #4 product, from CloudBees, was included for special distinction because we strongly feel it indicates an important new direction in coding. The product is still in its infancy, but we think its importance to the market warrants inclusion for a special award.

All products were tested on the judges' regular coding platforms as well as on virtual machines, some of which were hosted by Rackspace, due to the company's generous sponsorship of the Jolt awards.  Andrew Binstock.

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